Sheets or blanks of paper, plastics, packing laminate or other materials or material combinations are often used within a large number of different fields of application, e.g. in machines for the copying or transcription of texts as well as in machines for the manufacture of packages and the like. In such application a certain amount of handling of the sheets is unavoidable and it is customary, for example, for the sheets to be fed to or from magazines which are often in the form of stacking magazines where the sheets lie on top of one another in a vertical or inclined stack.
After sheets or blanks are cut from a coherent web, printed or handled in some other way, the sheets or blanks are fed one at a time to a stacking magazine. The feed-out of the sheets to the magazine can take place in various manners. In known packing machines the feed-out is done, for example, by one blank at a time being fed out substantially horizontally into the magazine, where, after it has been stopped by the front wall of the magazine, seen in the direction of feed, it tumbles down towards the bottom of the magazine and lands topmost in the stack present there. This type of feed-out is simple and the design is fairly inexpensive, but the arrangement has several disadvantages. Since the sheets are fed out and are allowed to drop down to the bottom of the magazine under their own weight and in a rather uncontrollable manner, it may happen that the sheets land obliquely or get stuck in a position which interferes with further feed-out. The rate of falling of the sheets in the free fall to the magazine bottom, moreover, is relatively low which hinders any relatively rapid feed-out of sheets to the magazine.